Mexico National Safety Strategy aims to boost security in the Sierra Tarahumara

Chihuahua this month will implement a security plan in which federal police and the army may patrol the Sierra Tarahumara, where criminal organizations have taken over main roads and drug-related violence is on the rise.

The plan is part of the National Safety Strategy that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced a couple of weeks after he took office last December.

The anti-crime strategy, which includes the creation of a national gendarmerie, will divide the country into five security sectors. Chihuahua will be the headquarters for the North sector, which also includes the states of Durango, Coahuila, Sonora and Sinaloa, as well as North and South Baja California, according to officials.

REPORTER

Lorena Figueroa

Chihuahua Gov. César Duarte last week announced the implementation of the national security strategy in Chihuahua during a work trip in Guachochi, one of the municipalities located in the Sierra Tarahumara where the violence has hit the hardest.

"Next month (February) will begin the most important operation in history to restore order and peace in the Sierra of Chihuahua (Tarahumara)," Duarte posted on his Facebook page that day.

Duarte did not give details on the operation or what day it will begin.

According to experts, a war between criminal organizations looking to control the drug transportation routes in the region may be behind the increase in the violence.

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"As the Sinaloa Cartel pushed the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization and La Línea, its allied enforcer arm, out of Ciudad Juárez, La Línea revived its hope of surviving as a criminal organization by focusing on control of transportation routes and areas of illicit drug production in the Sierra Madre Occidental in western Chihuahua state," according to a recent report by Stratfor, a global intelligence company based in Austin.

The production of drugs in the so called "Triángulo Dorado," where the mountains of Durango, Sinaloa and Chihuahua converge, has been under the control of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Víctor Salinas, a state government spokesperson in Chihuahua City, said Duarte is expected to outline the plan in the next days.

Salinas mentioned that one of the objectives of the plan is to reinforce the safety and security in the region's main roads, where there are no police checkpoints or frequent patrols like those seen in other parts of the state.

He said that state's police officers will patrol the region's roads, without giving further details.

But Carlos González, state Attorney General's office spokesman, said that the plan will involve the support of the federal police and army. He did not say how or what kind of work they will be doing.

Mexican media report that there is also an initiative to bring 450 federal officers to Chihuahua as part of the force that will enforce the state's security plan.

Guachochi state representative Samuel Díaz Palma, of the New Alliance Party and chairman of the Vulnerable Groups Special Commission, said his staff is waiting to hear details of the security plan, which he welcomes.

"At least we are seeing willingness from the state's government to attack the problem," he said.

Authorities and activists agree that the violence in the municipalities of Guachochi, Guadalupe y Calvo, Batopilas, Morelos, and Uruachi has gone form bad to worse in the last year. Areas more popular with tourists, such as Creel and Urique, have not been hit by the violence yet.

Armed groups tied to criminal organizations have closed main roads and established their own checkpoints in affected municipalities.

"They park two or three trucks in the middle of the road to close it. Then, if you want to go through their 'checkpoint,' you have to be willing to be questioned and inspected. After they talk in codes to who knows who through radios, they will let you pass," said the Rev. Javier Avila, who is president of the Solidarity and Human Rights Defense Commission organization and works directly with residents and indigenous people in the Sierra Tarahumara.

He said that residents, in a way, have gotten used to the "nuisance criminals cause" with their checkpoints, because most of the time, they are looking for their enemies.

"The problem is the criminal activities they do against innocent people, the impunity of which criminals commit their crimes and the fear they cause among residents," Avila said.

González, from the Attorney General's office, did not have recent crime statistics for the municipalities affected by the violence.

But authorities and activists agreed that extortions, kidnappings, robberies and homicides in the tourist areas have gone up.

For example, in Guadalupe y Calvo there have been dozens of shootings and killings, including women and children, in the last year. In August, the whole police force in the town resigned after officers received death threats from gang members.

Díaz Palma said that mayors and town representatives cannot do anything to protect their people from criminals, which have more manpower and guns than the local police.

The few military units and state police officers working in the region are ineffective because most of the time they are confined to their barracks, he added.

"And, when they patrol, criminals hide or shootings have long passed," he said.

Avila doubts that the state's security plan will succeed in the Sierra Tarahumara.

"To re-establish the peace and safety in the Sierra, authorities need to come, sit and talk to the people living here and coexist with them. They have to stop dictating from an office, what will work, like they have done in the past with other government programs that have failed," he said.

Lorena Figueroa may be reached at lfigueroa@elpasotimes.com; 546-6129.